Toolkit for Killer marketing research presentations

We all deliver presentations, sometimes good and sometimes not so good. We all sleep through presentations sometimes on purposes and sometimes unintentional. I have delivered several presentations in my career sometimes as key note speaker, sometimes as a communication planner and sometimes as a researcher. I think, I have some points that I can share with you about presentation

1. Break the PowerPoint structure

Powerpoint is like women/men, you cant live with it and you cant live without it.

Some tips for using power points are avoid jargons, bullets, too much text. Add a conclusion slide every now and then. I personally enjoy presentations where presenter is humble, interactive and approachable. Here are 15 keys to deliver a fantastic keynote presentation on stage by one such presenter Ronnestam.

Data is the new oil, and few ways are better than a good visualisation for consuming our excess of it. But please be very careful when using or making infographic there is nothing worse than a bad infographic (not even a dull powerpoint)

Caution: Easy tool, but publishes the data online so be careful with the use.

Nothing can be worse than Bad Infographics

3. Master Excel

A powerful interactive dashboard on excel is worth a million slides. It allows users to play with data and digest information. These days I am using dashboards for presentations, dashboards are based on excel with simple if functions and pivot charts and table. The benefit is this, since the visual on the multimedia stays almost the same people pay more attention to you. In addition to that, a dashboard cuts through the Bullsh*** and you come straight to the point. Here is the link for Chandoo (guy from whom I have remotely learned the art of excel dashboards), go through his site, he has some awesome stuff

Tool: Excel, Chandoo & your intelligence

4. Ice Breakers

Nothing is better than a relevant, insightful ice breaker. Researchers’ sell insights all the time – and so does advertisers’, marketers’, moviemakers and journalists. The good news is that any insight you have discovered has already been discovered by someone somewhere and he has visualized it for you. So feel free to bank on them. Nothing is more powerful than a presentation that opens up or ends up on a powerful & relevant image/video. Some sources for such images are Ads of the world , Logic + Emotion (visual thinking archive) , marketoonist Fishburne your mobile camera and my blog.